Editor's Note

We must not just listen, but learn from these experiences.

In June of 2020, this project began as the heightening of the Black Lives Matter movement swept the globe, inviting the world to bear witness to the ongoing atrocities committed against the Black community. With enduring protest and discussion, blatant inequalities have been increasingly exposed at every scale, further revealing a mangled system of oppression central to the core of many practices. The waves of this movement have propelled institutions across the world to re-examine their complacency in systemic racism. We recognize that our niche, the field of architecture, is academically, professionally, and culturally complicit.

Theory may peddle an architectural appeal to the "universality of human nature", but how might it address the diversity of lived human experience? Often ignored is how the nuances of such politicized spaces and experiences forgo recognition in our field.

With this project, we attempt to further the conversation and understanding of implicit bias, erasure, and othering as it manifests in the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC). We believe it is vital that we bring focus to uplifting marginalized identities and to call attention to a cause where attention is so direly needed. We want to open the dialogue here and now; "here" describing a place that cannot be detached from the concept of self—parallel to BIPOC identities—and "now" underscoring the urgency to lay these inequities bare.

We hope to decentralize the assumptive approaches to architectural pedagogy and provide an equitable forum for BIPOC experiences, visions, and forms of architectural discourse in printed matter.

We thank all those who have contributed to this project. This publication belongs to a larger digitally published project, that may be found at www. galtpublication.com. Our website also includes a gathered list of resources for further reading on systemic racism, the ways in which we are complicit, and how a deeper self-examination can instigate action.

In openly discussing these issues, we seek to evade simply evoking stagnant empathy or promoting mollified associations with ‘diversity and inclusion’. Instead, we hope to directly address inequities, reflect on the key causes and call for readers to similarly engage in introspection. We must not just listen, but learn from these experiences.